Longmont-based DigitalGlobe shows off WorldView-3

Ball Aerospace has built it, the other two WorldViews and the QuickBird, which is still in orbit nearly 13 years later

By Tony Kindelspire

Times-Call staff writer

Posted:
05/13/2014 02:40:36 PM MDT

Updated:
05/13/2014 05:05:11 PM MDT

Gearing up for its first launch since it became the only major U.S. commercial satellite company, DigitalGlobe on Tuesday decided to throw a little party.

Hosting the party was Ball Aerospace & Technologies, the company DigitalGlobe contracted with to build the WorldView-3, which is scheduled for launch on August 13 or 14 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

"This is very much a Colorado mission," Rob Strain, the president of Ball Aerospace, told the crowd of about 50 media people and other invited guests.

Aside from Longmont-based DigitalGlobe paying for it and Boulder-based Ball Aerospace building it, Centennial-based United Launch Alliance will handle getting the bird into orbit.

At one point during Strain's remarks Walter Scott, DigitalGlobe's co-founder and chief technology officer, exchanged a warm handshake with Cary Ludtke, Ball Aerospace vice president and general manager for Ball's operational space business unit.

"Walter and I have known each other since EarlyBird," Ludtke said later, referring to the 1997 satellite launched when DigitalGlobe was known as EarthWatch. The EarlyBird was lost in space four days after liftoff.

Technicians are seen working in a cleanroom on DigitalGlobe's WorldView-3 satellite on Tuesday. The satellite is scheduled to be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California August 13 or 14. (Matthew Jonas / Longmont Times-Call)

The company suffered another setback in 2000 when its QuickBird-1 also failed.

But since then DigitalGlobe has been on a roll. The QuickBird-2, now just called QuickBird, launched successfully in 2001 and is still in orbit. WorldView-3 follows the launch of WorldView-1 in 2007 and WorldView-2 in 2009.

Jeff Dierks, WorldView program manager for Ball Aerospace, noted Tuesday that WorldView-3 is the fifth satellite his company has built for DigitalGlobe and the fourth he's been involved in.

Since acquiring its largest rival in the commercial satellite business, Virginia-based GeoEye, two years ago, DigitalGlobe has added that company's IKONOS and GeoEye-1 satellites to its fleet.

GeoEye-2 is currently under construction.

Jeffrey Tarr, DigitalGlobe's president and CEO since 2011, began his remarks by thanking Scott for founding the company. He then walked the audience through some of the practical — and sometimes dramatic — byproducts of his company's efforts.

DigitalGlobe took the lead in scanning the Indian Ocean for traces of Malaysian Flight 370, Tarr noted, and NATO tapped it to provide satellite photos of the Russian troop buildup on the Ukrainian border.

The company's imagery is at the heart of George Clooney's Satellite Sentinel project, in which human rights abuses in the Sudan are being monitored. DigitalGlobe's satellites have also captured images of North Korean prison camps and tracked the migration of animals for the Jane Goodall Institute.

Jeff Dierks, of Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., and DigitalGlobe's president and CEO, Jeffrey Tarr, answer questions from the media during an open house at Ball Aerospace on Tuesday. (Matthew Jonas / Longmont Times-Call)

On the domestic front, Tarr showed a dramatic before-and-after sequence of pictures from Moore, Oklahoma, devastated by a tornado a year ago this month.

"Of all the work we do, when we can help first responders save lives, that's one of the most rewarding things we can do," Tarr said.

Closer to home, he showed images from last September's flooding in Boulder County, and images of the wildfires that are a perennial scourge in Colorado.

"WorldView-3 is going to make a special contribution to this particular fight," Tarr said. "With (high-resolution) shortwave infrared, we will be able to bring visibility to what's behind the smoke, something that's never been possible before."

In fact, Scott said a few moments later, the advanced technology of the WorldView-3 will also allow for detection of the amount of moisture in the ground, as well as identify specific types of crops and minerals — all from an orbit of more than 380 miles.

The WorldView-3 will be the first in DigitalGlobe's fleet capable of capturing images at 1 foot, or 30-centimeter, resolutions. So far the company is limited to selling images to its commercial customers that are no tighter than 50 centimeters, although Tarr said he's hopeful that rule — which he said is being reviewed by people within the U.S. intelligence community — will be changed.

Tarr said that the entire WorldView-3 project, from the earliest stages of design to its launch into orbit, carries a price tag of about a half-billion dollars.

After the speeches, media and other guests were given a tour of the gigantic clean room where the satellite is being stored as it undergoes final testing between now and the time it's scheduled to be shipped to California in June.

The satellite is 18 feet 7 inches tall, 8 feet across and, when it's solar array is deployed when orbiting, 28 feet across. It's capable of caputuring up to 680,000 square kilometers — or more than 422,000 square miles — of images every day.

DigitalGlobe, which employs approximately 750 at its Longmont facility, has already announced plans to relocate its headquarters to Westminster in 2015. The company has said it will maintain a presence in Longmont, although it has not been specific as to what that means. More details on that are expected this summer.

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